Microsoft talks about the screen when Windows 7 starts

Recently, Microsoft updated an article on startup screen design on the official Windows 7 blog. From these small details, we can see Microsoft's emphasis on the next generation operating system.

Design

In order to surpass Windows Vista, Windows 7 must have more "personality" than the previous generation. Among them, "light and shadow" effect is even more indispensable factor. From a design perspective, Microsoft hopes that Windows 7 will be closer to life than its predecessor, rather than a deadly machine.

Microsoft designed more than 20 splash screens and reviewed them one by one, plus user testing to filter them. The final design is the solution we finally saw. The combination of light spots rising from four directions is the Windows flag, and it is enhanced by the light and shadow effect.

From a design perspective, this splash screen satisfies Microsoft's design goals, but only design is not enough, and some content needs to be considered in terms of hardware performance.

Performance Factors

Some people think that Vista's boot animation is at the same level as Windows 7's boot animation, but in fact, Microsoft has changed a lot of code in the boot screen.

Vista boot loader uses 640x480 resolution, color depth is only 16bits, in Win7, boot loader has been improved to 1024x768 pixels, color depth has also become 32bits. Of course, the graphics card driver has not been loaded during the boot process, so the content is completed by the CPU, and the graphics display is completed by updating the buffer. Microsoft has made the biggest optimization, providing boot performance in a combination of CPU and cache.

Supporting a variety of hardware configurations

The boot experience requires the best visual experience for the user, but make sure that this feature supports a variety of Kind of hardware. Users may find that animations start appearing after the system has been in use for a while, and the delay is actually due to different hardware and “depends on the person”. In fact, in order to provide the best performance and quality, animations are presented in a way that runs asynchronously after other I/O runs.

Users may notice that the banner size of Windows 7 may vary depending on the screen size. Due to technical limitations, Win7 boot can only display the default resolution set by Microsoft at 1024x768, even if the hardware supports it. For larger resolutions, the Win7 boot screen can only be set to stretch to fill the screen.